An outline of a program, written in a form that can easily be converted into real programming statements. For example, the pseudocode for a bubble sortroutine might be written:

while not at end of list compare adjacent elements if second is greater than first switch them get next two elements if elements were switchedrepeat for entire list

Pseudocode cannot be compiled nor executed, and there are no real formatting or syntax rules. It is simply one step - an important one - in producing the final code. The benefit of pseudocode is that it enables the programmer to concentrate on the algorithms without worrying about all the syntactic details of a particular programming language. In fact, you can write pseudocode without even knowing what programming language you will use for the final implementation.